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> Attempt to answer the question, or don’t comment at all. Don’t tell them to RTFM, Google it, No, just no. There is no point to any of all this search technol

by mhurron 11y ago

> Attempt to answer the question, or don’t comment at all. Don’t tell them to RTFM, Google it, No, just no. There is no point to any of all this search technology and this accumulated knowledge if no one uses it. Someone asking a question that is answered in the documentation or has been asked and answered over and over should be pointed at those sources. One of the most important skills anyone is going to learn in a technical position is finding answers to questions you have that have already been answered. The next important skill they have to learn is doing a little bit of your own research in understanding your problem. This goes especially for places like StackOverflow which is not a discussion forum. It's value is diminished by asking and answering the same questions over and over. EDIT: I'll mention the last part of the statement I quoted too, it's unfortunate the lumped the second half of the statement with the first. > correct their grammar, or give your opinions about their choice of technology Correcting grammar is not helpful in any way in this context. If you can't understand what they're getting at, ask for clarification. Nitpicking grammar is just being a dick. Opinions about what they're using may have one very narrow use, if what they're using to do what they're trying to do is just so very wrong. And we're talking 'I'm trying to create a pure HTML page to run this Nuclear reactor' levels of wrong. Most of the time, you do need to keep it to yourself. Especially on sites like StackOverflow, which is not a discussion board.

hellofunk 11y ago
I would say that the real help lies in between. You don't go out of your way to explain something that is explained somewhere else already. But, you can go out of your way to show the person where it is explained or even what to search for. Researching a problem on the internet is a skill that needs to be learned; a meta-skill, if you will. Whenever a developer has told me in the past to RTFM, aside from the rudeness of this abbreviation, it really is no help. If they gently said, "the API docs for the UIViewController class, which are located <here>, shows the function in question, and how it is used." etc.
- mhurron 11y ago
  > Researching a problem on the internet is a skill that needs to be learned Which will never be learned if you never have to do it.
  - hellofunk 11y ago
    I disagree. You can definitely be helped to learn how to do this. It is possible to show someone the technique of properly researching a difficult technical problem.
    - MaulingMonkey 11y ago
      You can certainly show someone the technique. But it will not help if they don't ever attempt to put said technique to practice. For a given... "repeat customer", I will eventually resort to search links, "What did you try", and then eventually "RTFM", "Google It", etc. - and intentionally not answering the question, to force them to go through the motions - if they don't appear to be doing so.
      - khedoros 11y ago
        I think that's where the need for balance comes in. Lead them to how to find the answer, and provide guidance on how to interpret it...but if they want to be spoon-fed, tell them to go somewhere else. I start out by showing them how to describe their problem in a way that's easily understood by a more experienced programmer. Next would be to tell them some search terms likely to answer their question. If they're still stuck, ask which part is the most confusing and work through that a bit at a time. Of course...this all can get very frustrating. After answering the same questions a dozen times, I often let someone else answer.
    - r_sreeram 11y ago
      Agreed. This is one of the things I appreciated about the now-defunct Google Answers. The professionals there would not only answer your question, but also include a set of steps that they tried, including Google search terms and such. This let you understand their thought process, the things they tried and the places they looked in, as to how they found the answer.
sotojuan 11y ago
My approach is to answer the question and then tell them they can find the answers faster in the manual/docs.
- mhurron 11y ago
  The problem with this approach is you make it easier to ask the question than search the documents. Your doing all the work, they just have to sit back and let someone else do it for them.
  - lucb1e 11y ago
    Not really. The main reason I hate asking questions online is because of the delay in getting a response. Even if I could get the correct answer on a silver plate every time, I'd prefer finding out in a timely manner by myself so I can get on with the thing I'm doing.
jchendy 11y ago
> Someone asking a question that is answered in the documentation or has been asked and answered over and over should be pointed at those sources. I think linking them to a directly-relevant resource like an answered StackOverflow question or a specific documentation page is a totally valid way to answer the question. My impression is that the author of the article is referring to replies that simply state "Google it" without providing any useful links, search terms, etc.
froh42 11y ago
In fact, sometimes I do answer with lmgtfy.com. But in such an answer I always include a helpful answer. Why? - Either they couldn't find it. Then my answer will help. - Or they were to stupid/lazy to search. Then they're not worthy of my ire.
unwind 11y ago
Regarding grammar/typos on Stack Overflow, often I try to simply edit the question to fix it. That might be considered passive/aggressive, but I just want it to be pretty. :)
lukev 11y ago
If you can provide links to the relevant portion of the documentation or a relevant google search result, I think that's fine. But merely telling someone "read the manual" without adding anything else serves no purpose whatsoever.
badloginagain 11y ago
As an intermediate developer I still have trouble with many source documentation. . It's a problem of information density- I don't know where on the page to get what I need, or the documentation examples have very basic implementation that don't cover my use case. And as a beginning developer you don't have the library of personal experience to work-around use cases. Usually I have to find a third party simplified documentation sites, like dotnetperls or ss64, which have easy to read documentation. Besides, at least with SO, it clearly states to search before you ask. The user is only asking because searching wasn't successful. An answer of "go search more" does not help the asker.
- douche 11y ago
  There's also the problem that so much documentation is just straight auto-generated javadocs or xmldocs, with nothing beyond what you'd get looking at the method signatures. MSDN is better than most, but there's still a ton in there in places that has no examples or usage information, no indication of what valid inputs are, no indication of any other external state that could derp things up.
- metaphorm 11y ago
  learning how to read technical documentation is a skill in its own right, and we all need to practice it in order to get good at it. obviously some documentation is better than others, and asking specific questions to fill in the gaps where documentation is unclear is a good thing to do. however, programming is very much driven by learning how to find the answers to problems on your own. often those answers are in the documentation but not always. sometimes they haven't been answered by anyone before and learning how to extrapolate from documentation to understand the behavior of programs in new situations is a skill that has to be developed. and of course, ultimately, the final authoritative document on how a program will behave is the code itself. there are times when you have to read source. hopefully those are rare occasions, but being capable of doing it when necessary is yet another skill that needs to be developed. reading through an unfamiliar codebase is difficult and requires practice and experience. all of these technical reading skills need to be practiced. beginners frequently make the mistake of denying themselves opportunities to practice those skills by simply asking for someone to tell them the answer.
speeder 11y ago
What you do when the accumulated knowledge, is wrong? Example: I've been getting hostile responses on StackOverflow when asked about RDTSC and MS QPC, and about some strange behaviour of XCode compiler. Found out that both MS and Apple has wrong documentation, and that XCode compiler indeed does things differently than the official LLVM distribution (And way different from the published Obj-C standard). How I am supposed to know that without asking someone that already knows?
- ktRolster 11y ago
  > How I am supposed to know that without asking > someone that already knows? A good idea is to ask the answerer how he/she figured it out. Usually when I run into compiler bugs, I look at the assembly output to make sure. I don't know why you were messing with RDTSC, but usually when I need a high resolution timer I use clock_gettime() or gettimeofday(). The former doesn't work on OSX, but the latter does, and mach_absolute_time() or clock_get_system_nanotime() seem to work on OSX if you really need them.
scott_s 11y ago
I think you are misinterpreting what the author means. I understand the author to mean this is good: "Python strings have a method, rstrip, for that. You can read about it here: https://docs.python.org/3.5/library/stdtypes.html#string-methods https://docs.python.org/3.5/library/stdtypes.html#string-met.... I find Googling 'python docs x', where x is what you're looking for is a quick way to see if Python has that thing included in the standard library." And this is bad: "It's in the docs, google for it." And even worse, a literal: "RTFM." I understand the author to mean that if you want to say the last two things, don't bother.
- lordCarbonFiber 11y ago
  Continuing on your point, one thing I've found with talking with less tech oriented people is that Googling is very much a developed skill. If you don't have the foundation of knowledge to understand what question you're actually asking it becomes very hard to RTFM even if the earnest desire is there. In my experience, when a more junior co-worker has a question outside my immediate expertise, I find my self searching for what they ~meant~ not what they are actually asking. I think a lot of disconnect in the community comes from this acquired auto parsing.
- slavik81 11y ago
  Nothing's more frustrating than Googling a problem and finding that the first result is a post from someone with the exact same problem as you, with the only response being "Google it yourself".
bargl 11y ago
One of my biggest issues with SO is questions that have been answered but the answer is wrong. Updating the answer to be correct is REALLY hard, especially when the user was a one off user, who asked a very good question. They just got a bad answer. Another issue I see with SO is, a question gets answered then the language advances and boom the answer is now invalidated. So someone asks, "Hey I know it's answered here but I think there's a new answer, or has something changed." Those questions get shut down too which is frustrating. I think SO should be a source of knowledge but it doesn't handle language versions well or out of date questions well. It doesn't even handle wrong answers well.
- bigtunacan 11y ago
  What's worse with SO is someone (new user usually) posts a good question. Someone gives a shitty answer that gets them by and it gets accepted. 10 people come along with correct answers, but nothing you can do to switch the "accepted" answer. The bounty program is also bullshit. I 100% agree with the fact that the bounty should not be returned, otherwise dishonest users would just not award a bounty on the correct answer so they could get their karma back. The 50% auto award of bounties to most up voted though is just garbage. I have had answers that are completely off base that extremely quickly get up voted and they end up getting the bounty. I'm pretty sure there is some type of voter ring style up vote fraud happening on bounties; at this point I doubt I will ever offer a bounty again since it typically no longer helps in me to find relevant answers.
TheTravCav 11y ago
> Attempt to answer the question, or don’t comment at all. Don’t tell them to RTFM, Google it, I think the point is that if you're going to tell them to RTFM or google it. you should also attempt to answer it or point them in the right direction. but don't tell them RTFM or Google it and nothing else. That doesn't help. A lot of time people have already tried that and don't know enough to know where to look or what to search. At least tell them to try googling XYZ or tell them check section whatever in the docs.
marknutter 11y ago
> No, just no. There is no point to any of all this search technology and this accumulated knowledge if no one uses it. And here we have a prime example of why beginners find the programming community to be so abrasive, and worse, it's sitting at the top of this comment thread. Ask yourself, would this be the answer you give to a 12 year old girl who's taken an early interest in programming? Or a single mother who's trying to switch careers to improve her lot in life? Or your own mother, for that matter? Is it really constructive to be so abrasive? I'm starting to understand why we have such a problem with diversity in our field. This type of response is, in no uncertain terms, the response of a bully. Pause for a moment. Try to remember what it was like when you were first starting out with programming. When "the fucking manual" was actually really confusing and loaded with domain specific terms, acronyms, and syntax. Can't remember a time when you didn't learn something immediately? Fine, step outside your world of programming and try to recall any painful memories you might have about trying to learn something outside your area of expertise. Ever go to a gym and ask someone how to do a basic lift only to be scoffed at? Ever been to a foreign country and have someone berate you for not understanding how to navigate through some strange process or not knowing how to speak their language well enough? Perhaps you have, and it hurt, but you brushed it off and continued on. That's great for you, but not everybody is like that. A lot of people get discouraged and never continue with that sport, or with traveling, or with programming, and it's tragic because they might have otherwise excelled at those endeavors.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  So true. And not just thin skins that get discouraged. After 25 bullies, you stop asking questions. Eventually you hit a brick wall and try asking again, just to meet more glib or hurtful answers. You get discouraged by the death of 1000 cuts. You stop.
- deleted 11y ago
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- krschultz 11y ago
  Yes, it is the answer I would give to a 12 year old girl. First off, why does your 12 year old have to be a girl? You are spouting off about diversity but you basically just used the stereotype that teenage girls are going to cry if you give them the hard truth. Why do we have to treat single mothers with kid gloves? Guess what, diving through some docs is a lot easier than anything a parent has to put up with. 3 of the 4 interns at the company I work for were women last summer, and they kicked ass. While they weren't 12 years old, they were young, and I had no issue telling them to start at the documentation. There is a massive difference between "read the fucking manual" and suggesting "even if it takes longer, you will be better served starting with the documentation and working through that than googling or using stack overflow". One is bullying, one is teaching. I always teach my interns to start with the docs. Give the docs 30 minutes before you Google or Stack Overflow. Give that 30 minutes before you ask a senior engineer. Struggling through it is part of the process of learning. The things you learn by going through the docs will help you later. Or the shorter version, I want to hire someone that can answer Stack Overflow posts not find them.
DanBC 11y ago
You can see that there's a difference between saying "Google it" and saying "You're saying 'foo', but you probably want to Google 'bar'"? Or that there's a difference between saying "RTFM" versus "This is in the manual in the section 'FooBar' - what are you doing that isn't covered there?" Because too many SO comments are simple RTFM responses.
pyrophane 11y ago
One thing I see a lot of developers (new and experienced) do is attempt to get around having to really understand the language and libraries they are working with by constantly googling whatever problem they are working on at a given time and assuming there should be an example or blog post out there somewhere that will show them exactly what they need to do. Of course, when the code they find is incorrect, outdated, or not easily applied to their specific situation, they lack the understanding to figure out what they need to do to fix it on their own, so they ask. This of comes out in the form of a question which, to anyone who has taken the time to build such an understanding, smacks of laziness, hence all of the "RTFM" replies. And in that case, RTFM is the absolutely the right answer. They need to slow down, read the problem code, figure out what they don't understand, and learn. Maybe they need to slow way down and learn about some of the constructs of the language they are working with. Maybe they need to read the docs for a particular library or framework to figure out what abstractions it relies on. Maybe they just need a high level view of the API so they will know what all is available to them. Could this be communicated in a more friendly way? Sure. Is it the responsibility of the community to do that? I don't know. tl;dr RTFM.
kbenson 11y ago
> Opinions about what they're using may have one very narrow use My general rule of thumb is the same I use for HN, if you want to comment about something non-related, or make an observation that isn't really relevant, make sure to contribute as well, preferably first in the comment. For StackOverflow, that would be offering a solution, or help in some way before offering as additional observation that "if this were me, I'd do X". For HN this is most commonly useful when making a joke. Unless your joke is insightful and relevant,you're best including some additional content contributing to the discussion at hand.
Lawtonfogle 11y ago
>No, just no. There is no point to any of all this search technology and this accumulated knowledge if no one uses it. Is there a manual? Is it searchable? Is it up to date? Is it common knowledge or has it already been pointed out? Was it written for programmers or does it require business/domain knowledge to understand? You could theoretically plop someone with the ability to read English in front of a computer with internet connection and they could learn just about anything out there, but a little guidance is going to massively improve their productivity. The way we should handle this at work is when someone comes asking for a fish, go on a little fishing expedition. If they don't get the fish themselves, provide them one. Keep an eye open for the ones who are learning and the ones who don't care to learn and respond accordingly. Outside of work it has to work a bit differently for a number of factors. You don't have nearly the obligation to help others work together, there are far more people, there is less direct communication. I'm not sure if there is a better rule that doesn't end up being abrasive.
cblock811 11y ago
> No, just no. This is exactly why I just learned as much as I could on me own. I'm inviting downvotes by saying this, but you're being a dick. That's the point of his blog post, don't be a dick. I definitely agree that new people should come in and.. read posting guidelines and be receptive to feedback. The problem is that if we want them to be receptive.. responding like this will not help
xg15 11y ago
> One of the most important skills anyone is going to learn in a technical position is finding answers to questions you have that have already been answered. The next important skill they have to learn is doing a little bit of your own research in understanding your problem. Exactly. And as the article was trying to explain, this is a skill which needs to be learned like any other kinds of skill. Shouting RTFM means you demand that skill from the poster or even insult them for not having it - what you're not doing is giving the poster any help or encouragement in developing the skill. A better solution would be to link them to the relevant previous discussion or documentation page or telling them what to google. This way you can actually bring the poster forward without causing duplicate discussions.
bloaf 11y ago
Except what I find tends to happen is: 1. You google the problem and find results from stack overflow and some out-of-date blog posts from 4 years ago. 2. You choose stack overflow! 3. The stack overflow question most related to the one you have is closed as a duplicate. The duplicate's answer is: "look at this manual: link" but the link is to some .edu website that doesn't exist anymore, or is for version 0.7 on a unix system and you're working on version 2.5 on windows. In conclusion: 1. The world changes, so the same question may have different answers depending on when you ask it. 2. Having multiple different representations of a problem makes it easier to search for it correctly the first time, not harder (even if they all just link to one answer.)

by mhurron 11y ago

hellofunk 11y ago

I would say that the real help lies in between. You don't go out of your way to explain something that is explained somewhere else already. But, you can go out of your way to show the person where it is explained or even what to search for. Researching a problem on the internet is a skill that needs to be learned; a meta-skill, if you will. Whenever a developer has told me in the past to RTFM, aside from the rudeness of this abbreviation, it really is no help. If they gently said, "the API docs for the UIViewController class, which are located <here>, shows the function in question, and how it is used." etc.

mhurron 11y ago
> Researching a problem on the internet is a skill that needs to be learned Which will never be learned if you never have to do it.
- hellofunk 11y ago
  I disagree. You can definitely be helped to learn how to do this. It is possible to show someone the technique of properly researching a difficult technical problem.
  - MaulingMonkey 11y ago
    You can certainly show someone the technique. But it will not help if they don't ever attempt to put said technique to practice. For a given... "repeat customer", I will eventually resort to search links, "What did you try", and then eventually "RTFM", "Google It", etc. - and intentionally not answering the question, to force them to go through the motions - if they don't appear to be doing so.
    - khedoros 11y ago
      I think that's where the need for balance comes in. Lead them to how to find the answer, and provide guidance on how to interpret it...but if they want to be spoon-fed, tell them to go somewhere else. I start out by showing them how to describe their problem in a way that's easily understood by a more experienced programmer. Next would be to tell them some search terms likely to answer their question. If they're still stuck, ask which part is the most confusing and work through that a bit at a time. Of course...this all can get very frustrating. After answering the same questions a dozen times, I often let someone else answer.
  - r_sreeram 11y ago
    Agreed. This is one of the things I appreciated about the now-defunct Google Answers. The professionals there would not only answer your question, but also include a set of steps that they tried, including Google search terms and such. This let you understand their thought process, the things they tried and the places they looked in, as to how they found the answer.

sotojuan 11y ago

My approach is to answer the question and then tell them they can find the answers faster in the manual/docs.

mhurron 11y ago
The problem with this approach is you make it easier to ask the question than search the documents. Your doing all the work, they just have to sit back and let someone else do it for them.
- lucb1e 11y ago
  Not really. The main reason I hate asking questions online is because of the delay in getting a response. Even if I could get the correct answer on a silver plate every time, I'd prefer finding out in a timely manner by myself so I can get on with the thing I'm doing.

jchendy 11y ago

> Someone asking a question that is answered in the documentation or has been asked and answered over and over should be pointed at those sources. I think linking them to a directly-relevant resource like an answered StackOverflow question or a specific documentation page is a totally valid way to answer the question. My impression is that the author of the article is referring to replies that simply state "Google it" without providing any useful links, search terms, etc.

froh42 11y ago

In fact, sometimes I do answer with lmgtfy.com. But in such an answer I always include a helpful answer. Why? - Either they couldn't find it. Then my answer will help. - Or they were to stupid/lazy to search. Then they're not worthy of my ire.

unwind 11y ago

Regarding grammar/typos on Stack Overflow, often I try to simply edit the question to fix it. That might be considered passive/aggressive, but I just want it to be pretty. :)

lukev 11y ago

If you can provide links to the relevant portion of the documentation or a relevant google search result, I think that's fine. But merely telling someone "read the manual" without adding anything else serves no purpose whatsoever.

badloginagain 11y ago

As an intermediate developer I still have trouble with many source documentation. . It's a problem of information density- I don't know where on the page to get what I need, or the documentation examples have very basic implementation that don't cover my use case. And as a beginning developer you don't have the library of personal experience to work-around use cases. Usually I have to find a third party simplified documentation sites, like dotnetperls or ss64, which have easy to read documentation. Besides, at least with SO, it clearly states to search before you ask. The user is only asking because searching wasn't successful. An answer of "go search more" does not help the asker.

douche 11y ago
There's also the problem that so much documentation is just straight auto-generated javadocs or xmldocs, with nothing beyond what you'd get looking at the method signatures. MSDN is better than most, but there's still a ton in there in places that has no examples or usage information, no indication of what valid inputs are, no indication of any other external state that could derp things up.
metaphorm 11y ago
learning how to read technical documentation is a skill in its own right, and we all need to practice it in order to get good at it. obviously some documentation is better than others, and asking specific questions to fill in the gaps where documentation is unclear is a good thing to do. however, programming is very much driven by learning how to find the answers to problems on your own. often those answers are in the documentation but not always. sometimes they haven't been answered by anyone before and learning how to extrapolate from documentation to understand the behavior of programs in new situations is a skill that has to be developed. and of course, ultimately, the final authoritative document on how a program will behave is the code itself. there are times when you have to read source. hopefully those are rare occasions, but being capable of doing it when necessary is yet another skill that needs to be developed. reading through an unfamiliar codebase is difficult and requires practice and experience. all of these technical reading skills need to be practiced. beginners frequently make the mistake of denying themselves opportunities to practice those skills by simply asking for someone to tell them the answer.

speeder 11y ago

What you do when the accumulated knowledge, is wrong? Example: I've been getting hostile responses on StackOverflow when asked about RDTSC and MS QPC, and about some strange behaviour of XCode compiler. Found out that both MS and Apple has wrong documentation, and that XCode compiler indeed does things differently than the official LLVM distribution (And way different from the published Obj-C standard). How I am supposed to know that without asking someone that already knows?

ktRolster 11y ago
> How I am supposed to know that without asking > someone that already knows? A good idea is to ask the answerer how he/she figured it out. Usually when I run into compiler bugs, I look at the assembly output to make sure. I don't know why you were messing with RDTSC, but usually when I need a high resolution timer I use clock_gettime() or gettimeofday(). The former doesn't work on OSX, but the latter does, and mach_absolute_time() or clock_get_system_nanotime() seem to work on OSX if you really need them.

scott_s 11y ago

I think you are misinterpreting what the author means. I understand the author to mean this is good: "Python strings have a method, rstrip, for that. You can read about it here: https://docs.python.org/3.5/library/stdtypes.html#string-methods https://docs.python.org/3.5/library/stdtypes.html#string-met.... I find Googling 'python docs x', where x is what you're looking for is a quick way to see if Python has that thing included in the standard library." And this is bad: "It's in the docs, google for it." And even worse, a literal: "RTFM." I understand the author to mean that if you want to say the last two things, don't bother.

lordCarbonFiber 11y ago
Continuing on your point, one thing I've found with talking with less tech oriented people is that Googling is very much a developed skill. If you don't have the foundation of knowledge to understand what question you're actually asking it becomes very hard to RTFM even if the earnest desire is there. In my experience, when a more junior co-worker has a question outside my immediate expertise, I find my self searching for what they ~meant~ not what they are actually asking. I think a lot of disconnect in the community comes from this acquired auto parsing.
slavik81 11y ago
Nothing's more frustrating than Googling a problem and finding that the first result is a post from someone with the exact same problem as you, with the only response being "Google it yourself".

bargl 11y ago

One of my biggest issues with SO is questions that have been answered but the answer is wrong. Updating the answer to be correct is REALLY hard, especially when the user was a one off user, who asked a very good question. They just got a bad answer. Another issue I see with SO is, a question gets answered then the language advances and boom the answer is now invalidated. So someone asks, "Hey I know it's answered here but I think there's a new answer, or has something changed." Those questions get shut down too which is frustrating. I think SO should be a source of knowledge but it doesn't handle language versions well or out of date questions well. It doesn't even handle wrong answers well.

bigtunacan 11y ago
What's worse with SO is someone (new user usually) posts a good question. Someone gives a shitty answer that gets them by and it gets accepted. 10 people come along with correct answers, but nothing you can do to switch the "accepted" answer. The bounty program is also bullshit. I 100% agree with the fact that the bounty should not be returned, otherwise dishonest users would just not award a bounty on the correct answer so they could get their karma back. The 50% auto award of bounties to most up voted though is just garbage. I have had answers that are completely off base that extremely quickly get up voted and they end up getting the bounty. I'm pretty sure there is some type of voter ring style up vote fraud happening on bounties; at this point I doubt I will ever offer a bounty again since it typically no longer helps in me to find relevant answers.

TheTravCav 11y ago

> Attempt to answer the question, or don’t comment at all. Don’t tell them to RTFM, Google it, I think the point is that if you're going to tell them to RTFM or google it. you should also attempt to answer it or point them in the right direction. but don't tell them RTFM or Google it and nothing else. That doesn't help. A lot of time people have already tried that and don't know enough to know where to look or what to search. At least tell them to try googling XYZ or tell them check section whatever in the docs.

marknutter 11y ago

> No, just no. There is no point to any of all this search technology and this accumulated knowledge if no one uses it. And here we have a prime example of why beginners find the programming community to be so abrasive, and worse, it's sitting at the top of this comment thread. Ask yourself, would this be the answer you give to a 12 year old girl who's taken an early interest in programming? Or a single mother who's trying to switch careers to improve her lot in life? Or your own mother, for that matter? Is it really constructive to be so abrasive? I'm starting to understand why we have such a problem with diversity in our field. This type of response is, in no uncertain terms, the response of a bully. Pause for a moment. Try to remember what it was like when you were first starting out with programming. When "the fucking manual" was actually really confusing and loaded with domain specific terms, acronyms, and syntax. Can't remember a time when you didn't learn something immediately? Fine, step outside your world of programming and try to recall any painful memories you might have about trying to learn something outside your area of expertise. Ever go to a gym and ask someone how to do a basic lift only to be scoffed at? Ever been to a foreign country and have someone berate you for not understanding how to navigate through some strange process or not knowing how to speak their language well enough? Perhaps you have, and it hurt, but you brushed it off and continued on. That's great for you, but not everybody is like that. A lot of people get discouraged and never continue with that sport, or with traveling, or with programming, and it's tragic because they might have otherwise excelled at those endeavors.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago
So true. And not just thin skins that get discouraged. After 25 bullies, you stop asking questions. Eventually you hit a brick wall and try asking again, just to meet more glib or hurtful answers. You get discouraged by the death of 1000 cuts. You stop.
deleted 11y ago
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krschultz 11y ago
Yes, it is the answer I would give to a 12 year old girl. First off, why does your 12 year old have to be a girl? You are spouting off about diversity but you basically just used the stereotype that teenage girls are going to cry if you give them the hard truth. Why do we have to treat single mothers with kid gloves? Guess what, diving through some docs is a lot easier than anything a parent has to put up with. 3 of the 4 interns at the company I work for were women last summer, and they kicked ass. While they weren't 12 years old, they were young, and I had no issue telling them to start at the documentation. There is a massive difference between "read the fucking manual" and suggesting "even if it takes longer, you will be better served starting with the documentation and working through that than googling or using stack overflow". One is bullying, one is teaching. I always teach my interns to start with the docs. Give the docs 30 minutes before you Google or Stack Overflow. Give that 30 minutes before you ask a senior engineer. Struggling through it is part of the process of learning. The things you learn by going through the docs will help you later. Or the shorter version, I want to hire someone that can answer Stack Overflow posts not find them.

DanBC 11y ago

You can see that there's a difference between saying "Google it" and saying "You're saying 'foo', but you probably want to Google 'bar'"? Or that there's a difference between saying "RTFM" versus "This is in the manual in the section 'FooBar' - what are you doing that isn't covered there?" Because too many SO comments are simple RTFM responses.

pyrophane 11y ago

One thing I see a lot of developers (new and experienced) do is attempt to get around having to really understand the language and libraries they are working with by constantly googling whatever problem they are working on at a given time and assuming there should be an example or blog post out there somewhere that will show them exactly what they need to do. Of course, when the code they find is incorrect, outdated, or not easily applied to their specific situation, they lack the understanding to figure out what they need to do to fix it on their own, so they ask. This of comes out in the form of a question which, to anyone who has taken the time to build such an understanding, smacks of laziness, hence all of the "RTFM" replies. And in that case, RTFM is the absolutely the right answer. They need to slow down, read the problem code, figure out what they don't understand, and learn. Maybe they need to slow way down and learn about some of the constructs of the language they are working with. Maybe they need to read the docs for a particular library or framework to figure out what abstractions it relies on. Maybe they just need a high level view of the API so they will know what all is available to them. Could this be communicated in a more friendly way? Sure. Is it the responsibility of the community to do that? I don't know. tl;dr RTFM.

kbenson 11y ago

> Opinions about what they're using may have one very narrow use My general rule of thumb is the same I use for HN, if you want to comment about something non-related, or make an observation that isn't really relevant, make sure to contribute as well, preferably first in the comment. For StackOverflow, that would be offering a solution, or help in some way before offering as additional observation that "if this were me, I'd do X". For HN this is most commonly useful when making a joke. Unless your joke is insightful and relevant,you're best including some additional content contributing to the discussion at hand.

Lawtonfogle 11y ago

>No, just no. There is no point to any of all this search technology and this accumulated knowledge if no one uses it. Is there a manual? Is it searchable? Is it up to date? Is it common knowledge or has it already been pointed out? Was it written for programmers or does it require business/domain knowledge to understand? You could theoretically plop someone with the ability to read English in front of a computer with internet connection and they could learn just about anything out there, but a little guidance is going to massively improve their productivity. The way we should handle this at work is when someone comes asking for a fish, go on a little fishing expedition. If they don't get the fish themselves, provide them one. Keep an eye open for the ones who are learning and the ones who don't care to learn and respond accordingly. Outside of work it has to work a bit differently for a number of factors. You don't have nearly the obligation to help others work together, there are far more people, there is less direct communication. I'm not sure if there is a better rule that doesn't end up being abrasive.

cblock811 11y ago

> No, just no. This is exactly why I just learned as much as I could on me own. I'm inviting downvotes by saying this, but you're being a dick. That's the point of his blog post, don't be a dick. I definitely agree that new people should come in and.. read posting guidelines and be receptive to feedback. The problem is that if we want them to be receptive.. responding like this will not help

xg15 11y ago

> One of the most important skills anyone is going to learn in a technical position is finding answers to questions you have that have already been answered. The next important skill they have to learn is doing a little bit of your own research in understanding your problem. Exactly. And as the article was trying to explain, this is a skill which needs to be learned like any other kinds of skill. Shouting RTFM means you demand that skill from the poster or even insult them for not having it - what you're not doing is giving the poster any help or encouragement in developing the skill. A better solution would be to link them to the relevant previous discussion or documentation page or telling them what to google. This way you can actually bring the poster forward without causing duplicate discussions.

bloaf 11y ago

Except what I find tends to happen is: 1. You google the problem and find results from stack overflow and some out-of-date blog posts from 4 years ago. 2. You choose stack overflow! 3. The stack overflow question most related to the one you have is closed as a duplicate. The duplicate's answer is: "look at this manual: link" but the link is to some .edu website that doesn't exist anymore, or is for version 0.7 on a unix system and you're working on version 2.5 on windows. In conclusion: 1. The world changes, so the same question may have different answers depending on when you ask it. 2. Having multiple different representations of a problem makes it easier to search for it correctly the first time, not harder (even if they all just link to one answer.)